Tuesday, January 9, 2007

more questions and comments on the iphone..

more questions and comments on the iphone..: Apart from knowing what is in the device, how well the touch surface works, rf performance, etc etc etc ... the question of a software development kit and "openness" looms. [...] I would be more interested in buying one free of a service agreement (even if it costs several hundred dollars more) if it is open and if I can program it. There are any number of interesting things it could do as a small wifi device (including voip) (Via tingilinde).

If the iPod is anything to go by, good luck. The price Apple pays to be allowed to play in these spaces is DRM for media, walled gardens for telephony. And it's a price they are probably happy to pay as it justifies tie-ins like iPod/iTunes Store.

Apple has justified its closed systems with the benefits of a unified user experience. There's something there, but as the enclosed area becomes larger, the justification is increasingly suspect.

The fact that these enclosures are associated with businesses that have not distinguished themselves for their innovation and openness makes this direction especially worrisome. Apple's new niche will be fashion designer and toll collector for oligopolies.

About Me

I am VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where I lead work on natural-language understanding and machine learning. My previous positions include chair of the Computer and Information Science department of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the Machine Learning and Information Retrieval department at AT&T Labs, and research and management positions at SRI International. I received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and I have over 120 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming, as well as several patents. I was elected AAAI Fellow in 1991 for contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, ACM Fellow in 2010 for contributions to machine-learning models of natural language and biological sequences, and ACL Fellow in 2017 for contributions to sequence modeling, finite-state methods, and dependency and deductive parsing. I was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1993.